Good news! The preliminary data from this town seem to confirm other empirical data like from the the quarantined cruise ship Diamond Princess in Japan (see my blog post here).
Gangelt is a town with a population of about 11,000 people. The low death rate of 0.37% suggests that Covid-19 is perhaps not much more lethal than influenza! Second, at 14% infections it also suggests that infectiousness of Covid-19 perhaps has been exaggerated!
"Crucial new data on prevalence of the virus
The news: A new report shows that in the German town of Gangelt, near the border with the Netherlands, 14% of residents have been infected with coronavirus. The findings come after 500 residents had their blood tested for covid-19 antibodies.
Why this matters: Germany was among the first European countries to report an outbreak of the virus, and Gangelt was particularly hard hit. If lots of people there have already been exposed, they may be closer to attaining herd immunity—and the end of the surge of new infections. But it would also mean the virus is spreading rapidly, with a large number of cases going unreported, probably because people never realized they had the bug. The 14% figure is both large and small. It’s much larger than the number of confirmed cases would suggest. But it also means the vast majority of people could still be susceptible to the disease.
A word of caution: The new data is incredibly preliminary, and the results should certainly not be extrapolated to the rest of Germany or the world (for example, Gangelt’s death rate from covid-19 sits at 0.37%, while Germany overall is seeing a 2% death rate so far). And as mentioned above, immunity testing is still fraught with problems that make results difficult to interpret properly."
MIT Technology Review. The Download. Your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technology (4/10/2020)
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